Poor old England: suffering so many blows, with such a long way to climb back up...

There are times when for nations, as for individuals, everything just seems to be going wrong.

Today, it’s apparently England’s turn.

We find that the English National Health Service is heading for a record £2 billion loss. That’s worrying but hardly surprising: we’ve known for a while that things were hurtling downhill fast. But now we learn that the government was keeping the figures under wraps so that the news wouldn’t overshadow the Tory Party conference, which is depressing but again far from surprising: we know this government has no aptitude for doing good things or doing them well, but boy it’s a past master at making it look as though things are going just fine.

We also learn that half of all teachers in England, according to a recent poll, want to find a new job outside teaching in the next two years. That makes it sound as though the school system depends for its survival on there being enough general unemployment to stop teachers finding other work. Upsetting but, again, not a huge surprise given the attitude of government.

Finally, those of us who could sit through the experience, watched the England rugby team being clinically taken apart by an Australian XV that didn’t just beat them, but outclassed them. Outclassed in much the same way as Barack Obama outclasses Dubya Bush, except that there were times the England team didn’t seem to be as quick on the uptake as Dubya.

So England’s in the doldrums.

England shattered
But Rugby may not be our most serous problem

Of the three perturbing developments, only two can really be attributed to the government (though it would be fun to blame them for the rugby defeat too). The first two are, as it happens, the most important, but hey, at least Cameron and his mates didn’t actually sell us to the Aussies (at least, as far as we can tell).

Curiously, but unsurprisingly, the only one for which we’ve had any kind of apology was the rugby. Both the team captain and the head coach have expressed their regrets for the lousy performance. Naturally, Cameron and his mates will issue no such thing. The collapse of healthcare and education won’t affect them unduly, since they can buy themselves whatever they need. Far from apologising, they are more likely to celebrate such decline as taking us in just the right direction – reducing government spending without damage to anything that matters to them personally.

When nations, or indeed individuals, go through a bad time, it’s often simply part of a cycle. There will be an upswing later. The trough leads to a demanding climb, but the effort will eventually take us back to a peak.

It certainly happens in sport. The England rugby team were world beaters in the early years of the century. They will probably be world beaters again. Fixing their problems will be tough, but it can happen quite quickly.

Sadly, when it comes to health and education, the solution tends to cost a great deal more and take a great deal longer. There’s going to be a protracted battle ahead. If we’re going to win it, we need to get started immediately.

Which probably means that, painful as it was, the quicker England puts its rugby defeat behind it, the better.

Brooks' Law and related matters: why projects go awry and companies waste time

I was delighted to discover Brooks’ Law recently. Do you know it? I didn’t, though it’s far from new.

Fred Brooks first stated it in his 1975 book, The Mythical Man Month. It tells us that in a software project that’s running late, adding additional programmers will make it later still.

Fred Brooks: still laughing

Now Brooks admits that this is a terrible over-simplification, and I’m sure it is. However, it seems to me to contain a powerful kernel of truth, that doesn’t just apply to software. However, my experience has been in software, and there it resonates strongly with me.

The reason why adding programmers may well slow things down is:

Firstly, the additions to the team have to be brought up to speed. The approach the project has taken needs to be explained to them, along with what’s been achieved so far, which can only be done by existing team members. The result is that there is a ramp-up period during which the new staff are unproductive, and the productivity of the other staff is reduced while they carry out training.

Secondly, the more people there are in a team, the more complex communication becomes. Between two people, there is only one communication link; between four, there are six links; between eight, there are 28. Combinatorial explosion, that’s called, and it’s dramatic.

In my experience, the most common answer to the communication problem is to speak to the whole team, at the same time. That’s called a meeting.

Now meetings are one of the two most powerful methods at the disposal of company executives to give the appearance of working while not actually having to do anything constructive. This is particularly true since there’s a common illusion that to be really important, a meeting has to be really long. So discussions ramble, go over the same ground again, and often involve people who haven’t prepared for them scribbling on flip charts, an exercise designed not so much to explain anything, but to clarify their own thinking – though it generally only reveals their confusion.

The other way executives contrive to create the illusion of work is by driving. It’s exhausting to drive from London to Manchester, so it must be work, right? Well, no. Going by train gets you there at least as effectively, and allows you to be productive on the way. But if that’s not your aim, going by car’s the answer: it’s as boring as a meeting, but it’s just as effective a way of persuading others that you’re actually doing something.

The communication problem is made far worse if the extra resources added to a team are off-shore. There is a high likelihood that some of the problem will be simply linguistic – an English-speaking project, say, to which a large number of non-English speakers have just been added. Just to make things worse, the off-shore staff will probably claim, and may even be convinced themselves, that they master the language. In addition, communication within teams that span time zones can be made difficult by simple chronological problems.

Nor is communication helped by poor specifications. I’ve seen this problem fall into both of the opposite extremes: an executive who refused to specify what he wanted from a project, on the grounds that he didn’t feel that was his job (“I’ll resign rather than have to do that,” he assured me); equally, I’ve seen executives who insist on specifications that fit a particular template and are often so long that no one can bear to read them. Most commonly, though, they’re simply half-baked: I saw a report emerge from a development project with the words “Delete This” neatly included on it, because that was what had been written on the illustration supplied with the specification.

The other problem with off-shore resources is that they are used because they’re cheap. A girl I was at school with bought a great deal of diet chocolate. She then gorged herself on the stuff, because since the diet effect was obviously going to be all the greater, the more she ate. Throw in enough off-shore programmers, and you end up with costs which will be as impressive as if you’d managed a small number of on-shore ones – but that would have required more of a management effort (see above).

This all takes us rather beyond the scope of Brooks’ Law. Still, it’s all part of the grist to the great mill of lousy software development so many of us have come to know and love since the days Brooks wrote.

Well, come to know anyway.

Caught on the prongs of a Trident

What on earth’s the attraction of Britain hanging on to Trident nuclear missiles?

Voices around the Labour Party are being raised in opposition to the leader Jeremy Corbyn’s desire to get rid of the British nuclear deterrent. I’m sure there are many around the country who agree with his critics. But are either the Labour leaders speaking out against Corbyn, or the voters who share their views, thinking through their position?

The full cost of the next generation of Trident is likely to be £97 billion over its 30-year life, or just over £3.2 billion a year. That’s nearly 10% of the total defence budget as it currently stands.

Trident. Macho, certainly. Expensive, for sure. Useful? Unlikely

Would anyone ever advocate the weapon’s use? If so, who would they use it against? Our biggest enemy these days seems to be ISIS in Iraq and Syria; surely no one would advocate launching nuclear weapons against either of those countries? At least, no one with a claim to sanity?

As Jeremy Corbyn pointed out to his critics, having the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world did absolutely no good to the United Sates when it came under attack on 9/11. Different weapons are needed against that kind of threat (and they need to be different, too, from the ones that were ultimately used: an invasion by land forces has hardly given us a stable, peaceful region…)

Even if we were tempted to use nuclear weapons against a more worthy target than Syria or Iraq, would we actually do so? Would we want to launch a nuclear attack against Russia? It doesn’t take a lot of nuclear weapons to do a great deal of damage, so we could doubtless inflict real pain on Russia, but surely no one believes we would survive the response? Even if we survived the radioactive fallout?

Nuclear weapons strike me as an extraordinarily bad way to spend a large amount of money. An investment from which there is only one set of beneficiaries: the manufacturers of the weapons in the United States. They, indeed, are the only beneficiaries of most of military adventures we’ve been on in recent years: whoever won or lost in Afghanistan or Iraq, the arms producers came out on top.

It seems that the support for these weapons is much more to do with people’s desire to feel defended than with any real defence.

Meanwhile, we’re constantly told how much we should fear terrorism. Government, keen to frighten us out of certain important rights, no doubt overstate the extent of the threat. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t deny that it is real and imminent. It strikes me that £3 billion a year could buy quite a lot of additional defence against terrorists.

Why, if we wanted to, we could spend part of it in the form of increased aid to some of the worst affected regions, such as Syria, for instance. That might help turn people away from terrorism in the first place. It might even help stem some of the flow of refugees out of that country.

Wouldn’t that be a more intelligent way of spending the money?

Meanwhile, Labour is being distracted by this debate from what should be its main concern. We need a powerful, united campaign against the disastrous, and cruel, austerity policies of this government.

Could we get back to that, please? And drop the irrational demand to renew a highly expensive investment in a weapon we can’t use and only enriches the wrong people? Especially as it only offers at best a comfort blanket we should all have grown out of anyway?

It’s all a matter of focus, focus, focus.

The British Labour Party: finding a form of leadership with a great pedigree

Leadership, if it means anything, is about finding a way to persuade people to come with you to somewhere they may not, initially, have thought they wanted to go.

That’s something that many in the Labour Party need to ponder. They point out, correctly, that a great many people in Britain are inclined towards the right wing, whether it’s towards the unpleasantly right wing Conservatives, or the even nastier right wing UKIP. They are equally correct that Labour needs to win some of those people back if it is to have a chance to form a government again.

Where they’re wrong is in assuming that this means we have to adopt the same policies: ape the Tories on austerity, or UKIP on xenophobia. That’s followership. Leadership is persuading them to try a different approach.

Abraham Lincoln was one of the world’s greatest political leaders. There were two particularly admirable characteristics to his politics: the ability to bring people with him, and the capacity to listen, learn and adapt, without abandoning principles.

On the first of these, he applied with consummate skill the notion that the trick, in leading people, is to stay in front, but also to stay in touch. In the immortal words of The West Wing, a leader without followers is just a man out for a stroll. 

So, though Lincoln always abominated slavery, and never gave way on the fundamental point that it should not be allowed to expand beyond the area in which it already existed, he was more than prepared to compromise with the slaveholding south to the extent of not pursuing immediate abolition throughout the US and by toying with notions of compensated emancipation: buying slaves to free them.

On occasions, he even fought election campaigns without mentioning slavery at all, if he felt it would hinder his or his party’s progress to speak out.

That strikes me as entirely legitimate, because what he never did, was endorse the positions of the other side. Never did he support slavery. In that respect, his position is in stark contrast with that of certain Labourites who advocate adopting a Conservative position on, say, cuts in benefits in the hope of attracting Tory voters. That’s wrong in principle, and it’s ineffective in practice: why would anyone vote for a party imitating the Tories? If they want those policies, they’ll vote for the real thing. The trick isn’t to go along with it, it’s to wean them from those views.

The Lincoln position isn’t easy. It leads to accusations of betrayal or of trimming, and Lincoln certainly faced his share of them. But in the end, it was he and not the radical abolitionists who ensured that the 13th amendment to the US constitution, banning slavery completely, was adopted. He temporised, he sometimes forbore to speak, but eventually he achieved what the abolitionists had always wanted but hadn’t been able to implement by more direct means.

He did that by sometimes judiciously shelving the slavery question, while he focused on the overriding issue of his time: saving the union of the United States. Success in that struggle led to success on slavery too.

When it comes to Lincoln learning, it’s fascinating to see how his position changed on Black equality. While he always hated slavery, it’s clear that initially he didn’t believe that Black and White could coexist, and backed the notion of “colonisation”: sending freed Blacks to their own nation, in Africa or possibly in Central America.

However, as events unfolded, he found himself evolving with them. During the Civil War, he was won round to the notion that Black free men could serve in the Army; eventually he accepted that they should be paid the same as their White counterparts; not long before his assassination he had gone so far as to accept that the “most intelligent” Blacks (whatever that means) and any who’d borne arms for the Union, should be allowed the vote.

He was still a long way from a whole-hearted endorsement of equal rights and universal suffrage (not even all White men had the vote, and of course no women did). But had he lived, how far might he have gone?

John McDonnell (left) and Jeremy Corbyn
Following in the steps of Lincoln?

Given my view of what true leadership is, I’ve been fascinated by the way Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, and John McDonnell as shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, have been behaving. They have left issues such as getting out of NATO, of doing away with the British nuclear deterrent, of leaving the EU, to negotiation with other Labour leaders, with whom they often disagree.

Like Lincoln, they’re focusing on the key issue. John McDonnell said it in his first Conference speech in his new shadow post: “austerity isn’t an economic necessity, it’s a political choice.”

Yes. That’s the first issue we need to take on. There’s a stultifying and deeply damaging consensus across most of Europe, that the correct response to the financial crash of 2008 is to cut government spending and inflict terrible suffering on the most vulnerable. As McDonnell also said, that is to make the victims pay for the crash instead of the perpetrators.

That view is beginning to be questioned in European nation after European nation. It’s a huge step forward that one of the main parties in one of the major European economies is taking up that cause. That’s the one to focus on for now, leaving others on the back burner – certainly, the more contentious ones that would split the party and make it less likely to achieve its main goal.

Once we’ve dealt with austerity, we could perhaps move on to the other urgent question, which has to be climate change.

Then we can look at NATO and nuclear weapons. And who knows? If the people are moving with us on the top priorities, they may well move with us on the others.

But that takes leadership. So far Labour’s looking a bit like Lincoln. And that’s promising.

Sometimes it's the less well known who are the most interesting

George H. Thomas isn’t exactly a name to conjure with. And yet, sometimes, the obscure figures from history can inspire as much admiration as the celebrities.

Thomas had a lot in common with a much more well known military character, Robert E. Lee. Both men won good reputations for themselves during the Mexican-American War. Later Thomas was posted to the US Military Academy at West Point, where he served under Lee. Most important of all, though, both men were Virginians. “the Old Dominion” was the wealthiest and most populous of the British American colonies, which produced some of the most significant figures of the Revolutionary War, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. After independence, it was the leading State, producing four of the first five presidents.

George Thomas: overshadowed by more famous men

In 1861, the United States were torn apart by Civil War. Again, Lee and Thomas had similar attitudes: neither liked slavery, both deplored session. But there the similarity ended.

Lee made a decision which leaves me appalled even today. Despite his views about slavery and recession, Lee announced that he couldn’t “draw his sword” against Virginia. So when his State joined the Secession, he resigned from the army of the United States and went on, as is well known, to become the outstanding general of the Confederacy.

Thomas, on the other hand, took a decision which strikes me as far more comprehensible and, above all admirable. He went with his conscience rather than his roots, and stayed with the Union.

Although in the end he had a distinguished Civil War record with the Union, it wasn’t a straightforward process. His first major achievement was at a serious Union defeat: at the battle of Chickamauga, Thomas was serving under General Rosecrans whose army broke and fled – with the exception of Thomas’s division which stood firm and prevented a defeat turning into a rout.

The achievement won him the nickname “Rock of Chickamauga”. it also gave him command of the army in which he was serving, when Rosecrans was relieved.

It was in that role that he faced the last great counter-attack by the Confederacy in the War, in the Battle of Nashville. And the confederates weren’t the only adversaries he faced. Ulysses Grant had by then become commanding general of the Union armies. He may have had some doubts about Thomas’s loyalties, but he was above all concerned by his slowness in tackling the army threatening Nashville. He wasn’t alone: Abraham Lincoln, who’d been disappointed by a whole string of dilatory, slow, timid generals who failed to tackle Lee when they could win, and lost when he took them on. Would Thomas be simply another such?

He was nothing of the kind. At first, he was waiting for his cavalry to be fully ready. And then – it was December – ice storms turned the country impossible. Thomas waited for the thaw and almost waited too long: the general Grant had sent with orders to relieve him if Thomas had still not initiated action, was already on his way, and Grant himself not far behind him, when Thomas decided to engage the Confederates.

The result was one of the great battles of the War, and one of the most decisive victories: the army against him was badly mauled and so disorganised that it  it never operated as a fighting unit again. Despite the pressure from Washington, Thomas had a major success to his credit.

After the war he commanded a large area of southern territory, based around Tennessee, and used the authority this gave him to act on behalf of black freed slaves who were suffering at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan or simply of racist judges. Later on, Andrew Johnson, who took over as President after Lincoln’s assassination, fell out with many of the men who’d been closely associated with the murdered statesman, including Grant. He asked Thomas whether he would replace him as commanding general, but Thomas refused on the grounds that he wasn’t interested in playing political games.

He ended up appointed to command in California, where he died sadly young, at 53. But the saddest thing of all? None of his relatives attended his funeral. They couldn’t forgive him for having turned against Virginia.

Like I said. The more obscure characters from history can sometimes be the most intriguing.

VW, News UK, Barclays Bank: ignorance isn't cheap

On 3 July 2012, we learned that Bob Diamond had stepped down from his position as Chief Executive of Barclays Banks. The Bank was beset by scandal, specifically charges that it had rigged the London interbank lending rate LIBOR.

A week later, we learned that he had generously waived his right to some £20 million of bonus payments, so he would be leaving with the pittance of a year’s salary, amounting to £2 million. That would barely cover the pay of 195 people on minimum wage, such as the cleaners who made sure that he had a physically clean environment to work in, however morally polluted it might have been.

Diamond made it clear that he knew absolutely nothing about the LIBOR rigging.

In 2002, the voicemail of a missing thirteen-year old schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, was hacked by journalists working for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Because they were listened to, messages on the voicemail were automatically deleted, giving Milly’s parents the hope that she might have deleted them herself and therefore still be alive, when in fact she had already been murdered.

In July 2014, Rebekah Brooks, editor of the News of the World at the time Milly Dowler’s and great many others’ phones were hacked, was cleared of all charges arising from the criminal activity. She claimed that she knew nothing of the practice, although she was editor at the time it happened.

Despite her blessed ignorance, Rebekah Brooks had to suffer the indignity of seeing the closure of the newspaper that she edited while it was hacking phones. She also had to step down as Chief Executive of News International, the representative on Earth, or at least in Britain, of the equally blessed Rupert. In consolation, all she could turn to was the £10.8 million payoff that Murdoch’s organisation gave her. That’s quite a long way short of what 1000 workers on minimum wage might make in a year.

Fortunately, however, the Sun on Sunday has filled the gap left by the loss of the News of the World. And, equally fortunately, we heard just this month that Rebekah herself was to be appointed as Chief Executive of News U.K., as News International is now known. It seems that the industry she graced for so many years is not to be deprived of her special skills any longer.

VW: a dirtier story than we'd been led to believe

On 23 September this year, the then Chief Executive of Volkswagen, Martin Winterkorn, stood down from his post, following the scandal over emissions test rigging. That took the form of fitting special software on the emissions monitoring system of diesel VW cars, so that it could detect when tests were being carried out, and run emission control systems that were turned off in normal driving.

He went despite claiming that he had absolutely no knowledge of the fraud. He was paid a little more than 15 million euros last year. That’s the equivalent of around 850 German workers on minimum wage.

What do these cases all have in common? They involve people who took massive salaries. Such payments are generally justified by the responsibility accepted by the senior executives who are paid that much. Responsibility, some might feel, requires an understanding of the organisation these people lead. But that’s the other point all three have in common: on their own admission – claim, actually – they had no knowledge at all of the wrongdoing in their teams.

Still. Who are we to question whether our major enterprises are making any rational link, between the remuneration they offer their top people, and their competence?

The NHS: as safe as ever in Tory hands

Labour lost the UK general election on 7 May, in part at least because it kept harping on about issues that were beginning to bore the electorate.

It constantly denounced zero-hour contracts, for instance, which tie up employees but not their employers: the former can’t take other work, but the latter aren’t obliged to offer them any work, or any pay, on any particular day. Many voters, including some on zero-hour contracts who found them attractive, but mostly those who have never experienced such arrangements, started to find it tedious that Labour kept denouncing them.

Even worse, though, was the NHS. The Labour message was clear. Let the Tories back and you may lose the National Health Service. This may astonish some in the United States, where the NHS has a bleak reputation, but on this side of the pond, a great many people value that institution highly and would like to be able to rely on its being there, in the event they ever need it.

On the other hand, Labour kept repeating the dire warnings and it began to turn voters off. “Yes, yes,” they seemed to be responding, “you’ve said all that before. How about changing the record?”

The previous government, which was a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, claimed to be protecting the NHS. Its funding, it claimed, would be protected. When other budgets were cut, NHS finance would remain sacrosanct, and even grow.

The Labour Party questioned this claim. First of all, while it was true that funding was increasing, it was not increasing in line with the specific inflation of the healthcare sector, where the availability of increasingly effective but increasingly expensive treatments puts budgets under pressure. Nor, and this was a much more significant problem, was it increasing in line with increasing demand for healthcare: an ageing population, which is additionally beset by growing numbers of chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity, is generating constantly growing demand for care, for diseases that start earlier and last longer than before.

Worst of all though, and above all dangerously hidden, is the consequence of what on the surface seems to be a positive idea. There is increasing pressure for treatment to take place outside the hospital environment. Care in hospitals tends to be far more expensive, and it’s an environment which is often demoralising to patients and even unsafe – they’re surrounded by other sick people, after all – and it makes sense to treat in the community as far as is possible.

Unfortunately, a great deal of community care takes the form of social care, for which the NHS is not responsible. It’s handled by local government – and that sector has absolutely not had its budgets protected. So to maintain the kinds of levels of social care the new initiatives require often means calling on the NHS to fund an increasing proportion of it. Those outflows from the NHS are certainly not covered by the allegedly protected funding arrangements.

This week, Norman Lamb, Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, came out with a dramatic statement that the NHS would crash within two years without a massive injection of funds from the government. Interestingly, Lamb is well-placed to make that judgement. He served as a minister of health in the last government. So he was part of the team that set the NHS on its downward spiral.

It’s great to have his warning now, though it might have been more helpful if he and his colleagues had pulled out of the government and brought it down while there was still time to do so. But, I guess, there was no other way they were likely to get ministerial portfolios, and that matters too. Not as much, to me, as saving the NHS, but perhaps as much to them.

Addenbrooke's (Cambridge University Hospital)

Now we learn that Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge, a world class centre for medical research as well as acute treatment, is being put into what are known as special measures. It’s failing to maintain proper standards of safety. It’s the 26th NHS Trust in special measures, out of 160 in England. One in six.

One of the reasons care at Addenbrooke’s isn’t safe is that it can’t afford to maintain adequate staffing levels on wards. Which is perhaps not surprising, since it’s losing £1.2m a week. But let’s remember the Tories are maintaining funding to the NHS, which is safe in their hands.

It might be time for the people who were so switched off by talk of the NHS during the election campaign to see if they can drum a little interest in the subject again. If Norman Lamb is even partly right, they may not have much time to wait.

And – who knows? – perhaps after that they might find it in themselves not to regard zero-hour contracts as quite as monotonous as they thought either.